booktv.org. >> and there it is. [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon. i had a feeling this would be a good event at 4:00 in the afternoon on monday. a lot of people would turn out. i am bradley graham, co-owner of politics and prose. on behalf of staff, thanks for coming, now would be a good time to turn off your cell phones. when we get to the q and a part

of the session we have one microphone stand there and if you have a question step up to it, c-span booktv is here and we are reporting and would like to pick up your question on the tape and at the end of the session normally we ask people to pull up their chairs but don't do that. form a line to the right of the table, out to the street. being very hopeful. we end up in a "doonesbury" cartoon on january morning several years ago, woke to find the store mentioned in passing as location by a book signing by one of the characters. naturally we were thrilled and relatives and friends

congratulated us on having reached this pinnacle of fame because one hasn't really arrived until one store makes a reference in "doonesbury". donald trump hasn't just arrived, he has virtually taken up residence in "doonesbury" dating back to fall of 1987 when garry trudeau started marking what turned out to be the first presidential trial balloon. not long before, wasn't long before the unflattering portrait got under trump's thin skin and he tried as he is wants to do, striking back at gary by calling "doonesbury" overrated or asserting most people don't comprehend the strip. for his part, garry trudeau couldn't resist. he says in the preface of his

book, ignoring trump's comedy malpractice. there is a book titled alcatel featuring trump -- farenthold of -- much about trump hasn't changed, he once regarded as harmless buffoonery is now dangerously symptomatic. a few brief biographical facts, "doonesbury" started 36 years ago in 1975, the first comics trip artist to go pulitzer, several times since. also won numerous other awards, theater and tv and called the most influential editorial cartoonist of his time. latest gentlemen, please welcome

garry trudeau, farenthold of. [applause] >> those who come here, and here most authors speak, is this not on? i will speak a little louder. it is on? most of you who are regulars here are accustomed to hearing authors read from their books. that would not be a treat in my case, reading comic strips is pretty hard. what i thought i would do is read the preface from the book and explain to you how i had this peculiar relationship with mister trump.

farenthold of -- "yuge!" was not my idea, and she said you have done an awful lot. might be enough over the last three decades so we scrambled and my publisher got to it very quickly. what i am going to do is read you the preface and after that, i would be happy to have a conversation with you about a 12 farenthold of -- the preface begins on the back, selected comments from donald trump, a carefully curated collection of insults he has thrown my way over the years. the one i begin with, a third rate talent trying to get publicity on my back. his message conveyed through the tabloids boils down to this. get off my back, loser. which is not the entire words. the target having set itself up doesn't get a say over the

incoming. trump became the gold standard for big who breasts. to ignore him would be comedy malpractice. in new york city he practically owned the 80s rocketing to the top as the big apple's loudest and most visible ass hole, knocking off big-league rivals like and koch and steve rebel and the ridiculed industry the man -- the short fingered bulgarian with a gift beyond imagining and we made him a permanent part of our business plan. the earliest strips marking trump's first presidential trial began in the fall of 1987. i should be flattered trump told me but there was nothing flattering about betrayal, he soon became confused, then irritated. all the more as it suggested i was unaware how good-looking he

was. by the end of the week it was game on, trump had it on and i had a new recurring character whose real life counterpart could react in real time. i was one lucky tar baby and remained so for years. i had plenty of company. google trump and third rate and you will come across most of the country's comedians. no matter how many wiseguys wanted pieces of him there was more than enough of the big fellow to go around. after the first presidential head fake, the trump princess luxury yacht whose owners feared ocean travel kept more off of casinos, then came the extramarital affairs both real and imagined, conducted under klieg lights followed in rapid succession by the high-profile banking, his attempts to tear down a family restaurant to build a parking lot for limos, various televised spectacles the

most storied of which featured him hiring celebrities who were already out of work. these sexual fantasies about his own daughter, the truth or debacle, her -- his product lines. but the best was yet to come, as trump bore down on his 70th year he needed in the neighborhood to ruin so after 30 years blustering after 1600 pennsylvania avenue, he made good on his threat and ran for president. more like hyperactive and breathtakingly unprepared his physician declared trump to be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency trump publicly thanked his doctor's father who had been dead since 2010. you can't make this stuff up so why try. them people feel trump is beyond

satire but we professionals think satire is free for all to use and enjoy and we are not ungrateful. for our country we can only weep. [applause] >> the rest of it is just cartoons. i would be happy to take any of your questions. >> thank you. this is like a gift i just have two quick questions, how recent are the cartoons? are they up to this crazy time? >> they go up to the end of

april. the most recent half-dozen appeared. hold onto those. >> thank you. >> i wanted to thank you for your great work particularly what most resonated with me the importance of voting rights and given the intersection of the danger of a trump presidency, i wonder if you can comment on things to work on in this area. >> you will see more on voting rights, i have a character named jimmy crowe, he is ecstatic by the results in the country over the last 40 years but they are being rolled back, there have been a number of court decisions.

and no specific impact. we can't let that disappear. >> thank you. my question is do you believe trump will or won't win and what is your reason? >> i believe he won't win but ike everybody else, i check every half hour. i can't feel secure enough, a 97% chance, i am comfortable there but now it is 0.3. i admire the guy but -- silver, who is the genius behind 538 but i would like not to check every

half hour. 538.com is a website founded by a young man named nate silver who started as a moneyball guy, sports data analyst and became our premier analyst, he abrogates all the polls and uses sophisticated models to pull together what the odds are, he calculates three ways. if the vote where today, if you are just looking at polls, what the outcome would be in november and history and trends from previous elections. the vote today is most encouraging, almost 81%. the odds of hillary winning decrease to 73% if you factor in history. >> you have done this for half a

century? >> yes. change any parallels to trump? >> not in the way i used him in the strip. the only character -- he is not apparently. i lifted him from real life. he is a natural born tune. i like to compare him to daffy duck. the self regard and language issues and constantly stepping on his own feet. i took him right out of the box, took the labels off. the other characters regard him as a colleague. there are 12 characters who interact with him. it would be hard to go through a whole book.

it is the only person from public life i have ever done that with. i do very little caricature per se but the hair is irresistible. somebody in my business -- i go way back with that hair. i go back to when it was brown, then it lightened up and he set it on fire to run for president, this gilded confection we see now. that is hard to stay away from in my profession. >> i love your work but i have to say when i saw the cover of your book even though i love your book i was so turned off because i cannot stand that man. before i ask my question, real quick one, just assure me, i did buy the book, none of my $15 i

spent is going to go one penny to donald trump, billionaire. >> no. there would be no reason for that. and the poorly educated, it is owing to go to my children. >> my real question, he writes this himself, spent the last two weeks focusing on getting the african-american vote and saying hillary is a big it and all she cares about is the african-american vote and then when we have a prominent african-american family member murdered in chicago, on twitter he writes she got murdered, vote trump.

it really writes itself. how do you keep it fresh when he is doing these things himself? >> that is sad. some of them are outrageous in different ways and more fun to poke fun of, that one was tragic and he was -- he doesn't seem to have much humanity. it had to be explains to him why that wasn't the way to go in response to this terrible murder. the tweets get pulled down and new ones go up. the people around him, family members said that was a little cold. that is -- doesn't immediately give me an idea just because of the sad nature of it.

>> appreciate your work. david plus, who i respect, they call him a psychopath and in the morning, calling him a sociopath, which side do you weigh in on? >> what the book shows is the underlying personality disorders is remarkably stable, a kind of what i originally thought of as colorful, harmless behaviors turned out to be a cluster of symptoms or symphony of symptoms, and all of them troubling. you -- i'm a cartoonist, not a psychiatrist, to say things about any authority whatsoever, to anyone who thinks it through,

could well be seen as a referendum on mental health. >> i have a question but start with a compliment, we are contemporaries. it upsets me you are 20 years younger than me, since we are the same age. i think that is because you are a cartoonist and i am a sociologist. that is one complement. as a sociologist i have got to say, every week, my interest and pleasure to be entertained by you all these years and that is true for a lot of people. [applause] >> for most people you have to put entertainment first. it didn't occur to me until a couple years into the work that

i had this opportunity. whether i had the tools to do that they were pretty rudimentary. i was not ready for prime time. i think i was marketed by two smart guys who started my syndicate and i was there first feature. as an insider to the counterculture i was 21 and the idea was he is authentic because he is 21. he knows what is going on in college. these are dispatches from the front. i got by on novelty the first five years or so. i don't think -- people were unaccustomed to seeing those issues. editors gave me a hard time.

i got thrown out of papers, that ran for a long time, 20 years but continue occasionally. i have nothing but respect for editors and what they do and never called it censorship because that is what it was, each editor has the responsibility to decide what goes in the paper on any given day. they have the feel of their community. i can't pretend i do. i always try to back them up and particularly in those early years, trying to figure everything out, i was new to everything. which was one of the reasons i stepped back from being a public figure to the degree anyone wanted me to be, every time i got thrown out of a paper the paper would send a reporter and want me to defend the work.

if you have that many clients and you owe them all something it gets to be a distraction. i thought it would be better to focus on the work. that had one anticipated benefit, strip took on a mystique i don't feel responsible for but he is this mysterious figure who does this thing and we don't know anything about him. that they have given me a longer half-life as an artist. they didn't have to put up with me on the tonight show every night. >> welt kelly doing -- similar times during the mccarthy era doing an entire sequence with bunny rabbits. >> he called them the bunny rabbit script that the editor had them in their pockets, use

them whatever they wanted. we do that. either run it or don't. often there would be local reasons they couldn't run it. when i wrote about gerri brown, his associations with the mob when he was governor in the 70s, was knocked out of virtually every california paper. and in the country, those are editors responding dishonorably to regional pressure. >> important issues of race and immigration trump is more liberal on almost every position van other republican candidates were in style and rhetoric so i am wondering, i hope after is hopefully failed candidacy -- i

wonder if you agree, what other republicans, a senator from mississippi, strom thurmond on his 100th birthday, you were right, serious republican positions much worse than trump's change trump isn't going away and has all the pieces in place to create a media empire after he leaves. and he is not replicable in every way. it is all personality and emotion. he is not standing in front of a crowd and bribes through the crowd. i don't have to talk to two people when i have 12,000. talking to two people implies listening.

to my knowledge sat down at a kitchen table, he has not sat down at a barbecue bench or done anything candidates do. everyone has forgotten hillary clinton's listening to her. you can't imagine what that meant to people in upstate new york where i am from. not the adirondacks. he has no interest in that piece of it. 12,000 people, that is something because they are all cheering him and repeating his 1-liners but the think about trump's fans that mystifies me, the ones who love him don't seem to comprehend that he doesn't love them back. he has no interest in their problems. he happened to design or through accident landed in positions that matter deeply to them.

it is not reciprocated. he walks off the stage, back on the jet. you got it. >> what exactly inspired you to start writing cartoons? >> the question is what inspired me to start writing cartoons? there was an individual who inspired me, a football player in my college, very talented on the field, he was extraordinary, had a lot of charisma and everybody loved him and his team never lost games year after year. i thought maybe i would ride his coattails. he was a very modest self-effacing man who had a

career in professional football. his teammates respected him enormously. i decided to flip that on its head and heaven be an egotistical authoritarian quarterback who everybody in the huddle pushes back against. that was the idea. i never actually drew them throwing footballs. it was a one off. he was towing to graduate and that was the end of it. i have been doing it for three weeks when a syndicate found it in my college newspaper and offered me my current job. this is a story my kids hate. it doesn't involve any dues paying, doesn't seemingly involve any preparation, doesn't involve any obvious skill set. it just happened. you have to prepare your self, place yourself in the way of

good fortune. there are things -- wanting back my childhood, things got me to that place. nonetheless it is mostly an accident that i am here, you are here. >> you wrote a note to donald trump saying people do not really like you. [laughter] >> i think you have performed your civic duty. [applause] >> i am wondering after you separated from the strip did you always know if this event happened you would have to come back, no way you could let it go? >> i totally stepped away. a couple years ago i got

involved in television and i had done things in the past, not the show runner who has to deal with everything. i called up my boss and said i really like this, i am doing this show, how would you feel if we split the difference and do the sundays so i can work in this other field. i have been in harness so many years, how can i say no? a few years ago i stepped away from the daily strips. we call them classics now. they are reruns. i edited them to remove really dated cultural references, they are strips from the 80s running now except the sundays which i love doing and that i can fit into my life.

>> is there anything else that might bring you to a more active role other than daffy duck running for president? >> i am so happy i am doing it at this particular time. >> high. i was wondering in all these decades you have been making fun of trump, has he ever tried to contact you, phone you? >> he communicated through the tabloids and made his pleasure known. i have never met him. i have seen him in the field. at the new hampshire primary last january in the newsroom after the debate, he stopped in front of me and turned around, i was four or five feet from the

back of his head. i could not take my eyes off of it. it was the most remarkable thing i had ever seen. it was like a panel of gossamer had been lacquered down in golden slurry. camera doesn't do it justice. if you ever have a chance to see the back, the front is fun to draw because i don't know how many other cartoonists do it the same way but there is a single line you can draw and it zooms forward under the ledge and goes west over the head and down into the collar and that is where i start, that line, you can see it here. fun to draw the guy.

>> you are definitely one of a kind. if you ever decide to retire. any of your kids carry your political insights? >> if anything they are a little to the left of their father, especially my daughter who was a country singer in nashville and is now a corporate lawyer but she just had a baby last winter, was home with msin bc for several months. it is like trump had been installed and an air horn and that is all she can think about and talk about right now. none of them are interested in cartooning or satire or my world but that is true of a lot of kids.

>> i don't know if you know, i was watching rachel maddow a couple weeks ago, she was excited about finding this clip on the floor of the 88 convention. at the beginning of your forward, i am told i am supposed to be flattered but he was baffled how he was supposed to think about it because he was in the center of the conversation but he didn't know how to make out that it was flattery. >> it was a fascinating clip of chris wallace on the floor of the 88 convention, republican convention. which i was at. he asked this question and went back to tom brokaw who was anchoring and said i talked to garry trudeau and he had an

encounter with jeb bush. i was depicting his father putting his manhood in blind trust, i was 19 good with the bush family. tom said jeb said to me be kind. when i saw this clip on rachel i said tom, my memory is awful and yours is extraordinary. is that what i told you? what i remember him saying, he is quite a tall man. he looked at me and said garry trudeau, walk softly. come on. that was like go. it was an interesting convention but trump, i hadn't seen that in 25 years. fun that she dug it out of the

archives. >> one of the comments i wanted to make, trump is going to have this bizarre presence in washington dc on pennsylvania avenue no matter what transpires. i don't know if you are aware there is a big issue about lawsuits trying to determine if it appears the department of the interior and parks department has given the trump organization control of the part of pennsylvania avenue in front of the hotel as well as the ben franklin statue which is national park area. control, they can control traffic and -- >> i have got to come down for that. thank you for the heads up.

>> there is daughter whichever way this goes. >> let me take one more and get to the book signing >> longtime fan, two questions, when is the next season do? >> we don't think there will be one which is a shame. new episodes, we went on the road and started to plan for it. you won't get me to say anything bad about amazon because i had this incredible opportunity to do two seasons and that doesn't mean you get to do a third. anyone who tries to find out, we

don't think so. it is a bit of a blow. >> what will happen to the republican party. when or lose, this is changing, and if they are more like trump or trying to distance themselves i don't know. >> not just one splinter group but two, their message is being normalized and their spokespeople on the radio in television, i don't know how they put themselves together

after this. i did think -- trump exists. they do it without the benefit of his presence. a lot depends on how rates shakedown. [applause] >> set up a sign right now. [inaudible conversations] is on

booktv, the 16th annual national book festival, you will hear from several authors and john meacham, and we will talk to representative john lewis during the call in segments and the national book festival and booktv, go to our website booktv.org and follow us on twitter, and facebook and behind the scenes video and schedule updates. dave pratt discusses politics and economics and over house majority leader eric cantor and other programs this weekend include cnbc, economic policy similarities between presidents kennedy and reagan. and how russia has changed under

vladimir putin, you will learn how four african-american women propelled the us to the space race and we will talk to richard campbell about the history of america's national identity. that is a few of the programs you will see this weekend on booktv on c-span2. for complete television schedule booktv.org is our website, booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors, television for serious readers. >> the trend has been in the wrong direction on both sides. the congress is not assuming its responsibilities which has forced at least this president to do more things by executive order. >> no question they should have come together and passed immigration reform legislation. [applause] >> they weren't that far apart.

and yet this president and this congress would not sit down and talk it through. in the book i emphasize it doesn't take much to change this. it takes one thing. one person that is willing to be a leader and step up, whether it is congress or senator paul ryan has the potential to do that kind of thing. i have a lot of faith in him. or a president to say, i worked all the time with bill clinton. we didn't agree philosophically. he was a character. but we talked. he called one night at 2:00 in the morning. she picks up the phone, handed over to me, i say yes, sir, mister president, we will look

into that and hung up, goodbye, hand the phone back, with that he wants? i don't know. something about central america. here is the point. we talk all the time. we worked through all kinds of things, budget issues, tax issues, defense issues, safe drinking water, you name it, did we agree? no. a lot of times we pressed each other to the point we would get mad but we communicated was that was true with reagan. we met with president reagan every tuesday morning congress was in session. 9:00, sometimes it was bipartisan, sometimes republicans. this trend of not communicating is a recent phenomenon. it started to develop with your w even though he tried hard to get immigration or. i say to mississippians a lot of immigration is one of the big

issues in this campaign. if we had done what we should have done in 2007 we wouldn't be here now. immigration reform is not just about illegal immigrants, it is about legal immigrants which we got people who want to come to america with something to offer, can't get here. one time i had two doctors from canada that wanted to come to an underserved medical area, two doctors highly qualified. you would have thought was trying to sneak in saddam hussein. it was hard. i saw it in 2006 and now this president and this congress just don't talk. the deficit is more than ever. i worry about my grandchildren. it is not about me or us but the next generation. congress and the president are not dealing with it. the next president, all hillary would have to do as president would be to follow the role to a degree of president bill clinton

because he did meet with us and talk with us or if it is trump, somebody, some of us have got to reach out, mister president, you say you are going to change washington? first thing you need to do is begin to communicate. four things to make washington work, number one is communication. if you don't talk you won't get anything done. number 2, you have to develop a chemistry. clinton made me nervous, it was a chemistry that made it possible to turn this into action. the other thing we lost his vision. what are we for any more? republicans or democrats. do we really know what either side would actually do if they are in majority in congress and have the white house? last but not least, i have seen

it, leadership. one man, or one woman that will face the slings and arrows of the media and say we are going to develop an energy policy in america. we are going to have all of the above. we are going to do it. it could change on a dime, but it is going to take a person of strength. i have seen it. washington is a tough place. i wrote the high road. best thing about this is you learn when you get back up to do things better. it can change. i don't see it right now. i don't see it with mitch mcconnell. i don't see it with nancy pelosi. i see hope in paul ryan. i don't know what to expect from chuck schumer who will be the

senate democratic leader. he is smarter than harry reid, every bit as partisan as harry reid but there is one difference, he is transactional. he can do business. they don't say it that way in new york city but they understand that. .. [inaudible conversations]